“The Old Man in the Piazza”
by Salman Rushdie
from the November 23, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
I haven’t liked much of Rushdie’s work lately, but “The Old Man in the Piazza” struck me just right.
Every day, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun’s heat has begun to diminish, the old man comes into the piazza. He walks slowly, shuffling his feet, which are encased in dusty brown loafers. He is wearing, most days, a dark-blue jacket buttoned all the way up to the neck, and navy pants that fasten with a drawstring at the waist. His hair is white, and there is a beret on his head. He goes to the only café in the piazza, the Café of the Fountain, and sits on a wooden chair at a wooden table and orders a small, strong coffee. At 6 p.m., he orders a beer and a sandwich. At 8 p.m., he rises, wipes his lips, and shuffles away, presumably to his home. We do not need to know where he lives. Everything of any significance in his life has happened and will happen right here, in this little piazza.
Not a lot happens in that opening paragraph, and that’s just about the most exciting thing for me to contemplate right now: just observing a piazza and heading home after some food and drink.
Unfortunately for me, the story does not stay in this more pleasant frame. Rushdie is once again the fabulist, telling a story about how language, which he personifies as a woman, is weakened and revolts during a time when the people in the piazza refuse to speak negatively about anything. This harms language, you see? But, a few paragraphs in, language rebels and the time of the “yes” ends.
Five years passed. In the end it was our language herself who rebelled against the “yes.” She got up from the corner of the piazza where she had been meditating silently for half a decade and let out a long, piercing shrief that drove into our ears like a stiletto. It travelled everywhere, as fast as lightning travels. It contained no words. However, no sooner had it been uttered than all our words were unleashed. Words simply burst out of people and would not be held back. People felt great globs of vocabulary rising up in their throats and pushing against their teeth. The more cautious among us pressed our lips tightly together to stop the words from getting out, but the word-torrents forced our lips apart and out they came, like children released from single-sex boarding schools at the end of a long, dour semester. The words tumbled pell-mell into the piazza like girls and boys in search of happy reunions. It was a sight to see.
A new age begins: the age of argumentation.
I lost interest at this time in the fable. I’m curious if anyone else felt similar or if I was just being grumpy because I wanted a story about a man pleasantly sitting in a piazza.
What did you all think?
Ho hum. Another didactic piece posing as a short story.
I NEVER put a New Yorker story down even if I don’t like it but this was unbelievably heavy-handed and pedestrian. Once the central metaphor became clear, I started to groan. I would love to see if other contributors here could toss their two cents in.
Maybe if you knew Hindi it would resonate? The value of thinking for oneself and appreciating nuances is a good subject, but the handedness was indeed heavy.
Hi, Callie: That’s interesting. Why would that help? I believe Rushdie writes in English (and always has?). I had thought he was a Pakistani of Muslim background, am I wrong? Please elucidate.
“The handedness was indeed heavy”–Very clever wordplay
People who read and speak Hindi much more than English would probably think it seemed really Western. And reflects what they either most hate or most like about American thinking. If anyone agrees with almost everything he says, than it might resonate. Otherwise, no. It seems like this writer has totally gone Western. The poetry in “our language” he seems to refer to is Persian and Urdu love poetry, some if written by Ghalib, whose love poetry is considered comparable to Shakespeare and Milton’s best. But so American to refer to it as poetry. Everything only exists in a general way.
I may not have gotten far enough into the story to observe that, Larry. Thanks. I rarely quit a story but this one I could not take
I can personally say that I enjoyed reading the story a lot, although I’m not very well equipped to defend it. I loved the couple who asked the sage for advice on where to visit, then took the opposite advice, then thanked the sage: “Always! We’re contrary! We ask people what they think and then we do the opposite.”